Hurricane Irma Simulation at South Florida Using the Parallel CEST Model

Abstract

In this study, a parallel extension of the Coastal and Estuarine Storm Tide (CEST) model is developed and applied to simulate the storm surge tide at South Florida induced by hurricane Irma occurred in 2017. An improvement is also made to the existing advection algorithm in CEST. This is achieved through the introduction of high-order, monotone Semi-Lagrangian advection. Distributed memory parallelization is developed via the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library. The parallel CEST model can therefore be run efficiently on machines ranging from multicore laptops to massively High Performance Computing (HPC) system. The principle advantage of being able to run the CEST model on multiple cores is that relatively low run-time is possible for real world storm surge simulations on grids with high resolution, especially in the locality where the hurricane makes landfall. The computational time is critical for storm surge model forecast to finish simulations in 30 min, and results are available to users before the arrival of the next advisory. In this study, simulation of hurricane Irma induced storm surge was approximately 22 min for 4 day simulation, with the results validated by field measurements. Further efficiency analysis reveals that the parallel CEST model can achieve linear speedup when the number of processors is not very large.